About EmbeddedRoad

EmbeddedRoad maps embedded engineering into something specific enough to compare: what you know, what you have not touched yet, and what is worth learning next.

The problem

A CV says "six years of firmware" and a reader learns almost nothing from it. Six years of what — bare-metal drivers, RTOS scheduling, EMC pre-compliance, motor control, secure boot, timing closure? Embedded engineering covers domains that share a job title and very little else, and the usual vocabulary for describing depth in it has never got past counting years.

That is the vocabulary this project is trying to replace.

The map

The roadmap is a tree of 27 branches — analog and digital electronics, PCB and hardware design, RF and wireless, power electronics, control systems, VLSI, firmware and embedded software, industrial automation, medical devices, and the rest — holding 7,988 published topics arranged across seven levels, from fundamentals to expert.

Topics carry a rarity, in six tiers. Knowing how a voltage divider works is not the same signal as having closed timing on an FPGA or passed a radiated-emissions scan, and the graph does not treat them as if it were.

What it builds

As you mark topics, the graph fills in:

• A public profile showing branch coverage, depth per domain, and how many of your topics sit in the rare tiers
• A CV drawn from the same data, alongside the projects, experience and education you add yourself
• Badges — a catalogue of more than 4,500, awarded from what your progress shows rather than from what you claim
• Articles — over 150 written against the tree, so a gap in your coverage has something to read next

How to read a profile

Each topic carries its own XP value, and marking it learned awards that; completing a whole branch adds a bonus on top. Rarity is tracked separately, as a count of how many of your topics fall in the rare, elite and legendary tiers — so breadth alone does not buy rank.

Percentile is relative to everyone else on the platform, not an absolute standard, and it should be read that way.

The useful part is not the number. It is being able to see that someone is deep in power electronics and has not touched RF, instead of reading "senior embedded engineer" and guessing.

Where it is going

The tree grows, and the articles are written against it rather than around it. If a branch you work in is thin, that is a gap worth reporting — the roadmap is meant to describe the field as it is practised, not as it looked when the tree was first drawn.